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Resolution of Syntactic Ambiguity: the Case of New Subjects

Michael Niv
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Abstract

I review evidence for the claim that syntactic ambiguities are resolved on the basis of the meaning of the competing analyses, not their structure. I identify a collection of ambiguities that do not yet have a meaning-based account and propose one which is based on the interaction of discourse and grammatical function. I provide evidence for my proposal by examining statistical properties of the Penn Treebank of syntactically annotated text.

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Michael Niv. 1994-06-20. Resolution of Syntactic Ambiguity: the Case of New Subjects. https://arxiv.org/abs/cmp-lg/9406028

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